


rollin' in (i feel a dark swell)

by tangerinick



Series: nick's zine work [7]
Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Original Work
Genre: Other, an ode to diving - Freeform, and neat old storytellers named Giorgios - Freeform, fairytales - Freeform, nb|w stories, the ocean, the unmentioned island of Cyprus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-14 21:42:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28802262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangerinick/pseuds/tangerinick
Summary: When you dig down, inspect the grimy and clammy roots of every legend, not every girl gets her happily ever after; not every girl gets saved from the wicked witch; not every girl marries the prince; not every girl lives.Giorgios looks like the roots of every fairytale, skin tanned by decades in the sun, dug into the crevices of his face. Grey hair grows like mold over his head, and whenever he strips off a wetsuit, it grows over his neck and arms and chest as well. Age does not wear him well, but time has.for Lion Pride Zines - Volume #2
Relationships: Original Female Character(s)/Original Non-Binary Character(s)
Series: nick's zine work [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2111658





	rollin' in (i feel a dark swell)

**Author's Note:**

> more short original (sapphic?) zine work! this time from lion pride zines volume #2, my old pride and joy 
> 
> a recurring inspiration for anything i write related to water is the island of Cyprus, this is no exception. i didn't get to include it, but if we're talking diving: the [Zenobia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Zenobia)
> 
> why on earth some of the tags on this keep getting Freeform added to them i don't _know_ , but i've tried editing them a dozen times and i truly give up

"Once upon a time, when I was twenty, young and just starting out, there was this girl."

Many fairytales start with a girl, beautiful and untouchable and nearly divine, despite all her hardships and all her torment. But when you dig down, inspect the grimy and clammy roots of every legend, not every girl gets her happily ever after; not every girl gets saved from the wicked witch; not every girl marries the prince; not every girl lives.

Giorgios looks like the root of every fairytale, skin tanned by decades in the sun, dug into the crevices of his face. Grey hair grows like mold over his head; and whenever he strips off a wetsuit, it grows over his neck and arms and chest as well. Age does not wear him well, but time has; he tells his memories like an author writes stories, with a moral or a mystery or a punchline. 

"That was what, thirty years ago? This place had just started out, you know. Definitely not as many tourists as today, so there were just three of us, the three musketeers; Aphrodite, me, and– what was his name?"

Giorgios snaps his fingers, and El takes another bite of their apple. Memory is fallible, and sometimes Giorgios forgets his specifics. It’s endearing, but only because El knows Giorgios wouldn’t forget anything _actually_ relevant.

“Alex, or something? I don’t know, anymore, I’m getting old."

“It’s okay. Tell the story, my lunch break ends in half an hour.” 

“So, when this place started out, there was Aphrodite. She was, and I will swear my career on this, she was the most entrancing woman I’ve ever met. Not the most beautiful, God knows there are a million of those, but there are a lot less as magical. Diving in this area was her calling, for some reason, because you know the nicer corals are up north, but she loved it. El, I’ve never seen a person love the ocean more than she did.”

Diving _is_ better up north. Objectively, here, they only have a small wreck, a few grey fish, and a field of greasy seaweed. But subjectively, El understands, on some level, loving some parts of the ocean so much you’d never want to leave them, like a second home. 

“Those aren't even the right words. There’s loving the ocean, and then there’s, I don’t know, _needing_ the ocean? She’d come out after a long dive looking like she’d had her first fresh breath of oxygen in years. She broke her foot after dropping a tank on it,” El winces, “couldn’t dive for four months, and I swear, she was like a fish out of water. She could only swim a little, but it wasn’t enough. She got all grey, and shaky, and she’d stay out late at night, sitting at the beach here, just, pining?" 

Giorgios catches his breath for a moment, then continues, "I saw her sometimes, and—she had this beautiful, dark hair, thick and flowing, but she’d tie it up tight so you barely ever saw it, so when she’d sit there, just this still figure, with her hair down, El, I swear—she looked like a goddess. Or a nymph, banned from the depths of the ocean.”

Giorgios’ eyes have gone distant, but they break when El lets out a long, heavy breath they didn’t realise they’d been holding. 

The image sticks like glue to their mind; a human nymph, immortalized and ageless to El. There’s an attachment to that visual that El can’t place, like they were there, personally, felt the salt flaking off their skin and the ocean breeze move through their brittle hair. Saw the lonely figure of Aphrodite, wanted to dig their heels into the sand and offer her their own consolation prize of an embrace.

“Where is she now?” El asks.

Something peacefully sad crosses Giorgios’ face, and El remembers that Aphrodite is not a goddess, not a nymph, not an ageless girl sitting by the ocean; she is— _was_ —mortal.

“Nowhere,” Giorgios says, voice too stable to be real. “She used to go on these long night dives, after every workday. She’d be the first in, last out, closing up the shop, but before that, she’d go out all alone, and just—dive in the dark. Alone.”

El suppresses a shudder; diving alone is high-risk under the assumption that bad things can always happen to you, which they do, and if they do, there is no buddy for backup with emergency oxygen, or to notice you getting narced. 

Night dives chill El to some primal part of their soul, but they do them anyway.

Giorgios continues. “It calmed her down, she said. So she’d go off, by herself, disappear into the dark with a couple of torches, and she always came back.”

El hears the _until_ , before Giorgios has even said it.

“Until one night, a few years in, she didn’t. It was already strange; the fish hatched, that night. I went out to the shore with her, brought a light with me, and we waded in about waist high. I turned on the torch, and all these little fish, they swarmed the light, like a thousand moths to the flame. I almost dove with her. I should’ve. She told me no, she always went alone, she didn’t want to wait for me to put on my gear. I saw her wade in, just, duck under, and... and that was it, swallowed up. I went home, and–”

Giorgios halts, voice breaking. “Jesus,” El flounders, not knowing what to say, feeling the phantom loss. “I’m so sorry.”

For a moment, Giorgios fiddles with a dent on their wooden table. “It’s okay. It’s part of who she was, Aphrodite, the way she died, that’s why I tell it. It hurts, but, Aphrodite—the goddess, that is—she rose from the sea. It fits, in some cruel, stupid way, that that’s where my Aphrodite returned. They didn’t find her body. Everything that belongs to the ocean must return, somehow, and her whole being, physical and spiritual, undoubtedly belonged there.”

For Giorgios, not every girl lives. El falls a little in love with her, tragically immortalized in memory, nonetheless. 

* * *

Sometimes El wishes they were born a fish. Or a nymph. Or whatever the non-binary equivalent was. Do mythological beings ever have gender? Just– something that didn’t require a full suit of equipment and training. El wants the ocean naturally, in its purest form.

That’s not to say they don’t love their job. Their wetsuit is like a second skin, and realistically, it is the closest they _will_ get. They love meeting the people that come with it—though not always, it is partly a customer-service job—but they wish they could have the ocean without it, that the two didn’t go hand in hand. El wishes it were their natural habitat, for gills to sprout and splice their skin open, for their lungs to breathe salt water, for their ears to adjust, for their body to float naturally, and for their legs to turn to flippers.

Humans weren’t made for the ocean, so privately, El sometimes wishes they weren’t one.

* * *

"Tell me more about Aphrodite."

It’s been a long, draining morning; dealing with an arrogant beginner who refused to listen, and keeping an eye on a kid who kept wandering off during his test dive. Then the kid kept trying to swim on his back, failing, and turtling in the sand, and El was so done by the time they resurfaced. They need Giorgios, his beautiful distractions, and the salty pastries he brings from the nearby bakery. 

"Goddess, or girl?" Giorgios smiles.

_Aren't they the same?_ El wants to say, but bites into a sausage roll instead.

"Girl."

As Giorgios thinks about it for a moment, El sits on the edge of their seat. “She had these sparkling eyes, really dark, but they would catch the sun and dance. I had the biggest respect for her as a person, as well. I don’t mean to put her on a pedestal, she had her faults; she could get moods like an ocean storm. But she also had this way of entrancing people to the water; she had such an adoration for it, and a way of passing that on, you just felt like you had to as well.”

El asks, before they can stop themself, "Did you love her?" 

Giorgios’ ears go a little red. "I did, a little bit. I mean, how could you not? She was so, so bewitching, nearly divine when she smiled. Though, I don't think she could've loved me back, even if she'd wanted to."

"Why not?" El asks. 

"Both our hearts were in love with the ocean. But both our hearts were a little in love with women, too. Well, in her case, just not men.”

_Do you think she would’ve loved me?_ El stops themself from asking, and then, even though it hurts to even think of it, _I think I might._

“Sounds like my kind of girl,” El says instead, and Giorgios chokes on his pastry.

* * *

“I’ve seen the fish,” El tells Giorgios out of nowhere as he sits down at their little wooden table, still damp from his earlier dive. 

Giorgios looks puzzled. “The fish?”

El cough awkwardly, unsure if they’re crossing a line. “The baby fish. I saw them. My first night dive. It wasn’t planned to be that night, but I wanted to get it over with, because it was for my advanced diploma, and I was excited, you know. I’d never dived in the dark before.”

“But you don’t like night dives.” Giorgios eyes them. El has made their feelings on them very clear.

“Yeah. I don’t mind the dark so much but, uh, the fish. They scared me, they kept swarming around my face and my ears and I could feel them wriggling around and I just– I panicked so much the instructor had to ascend with me.” El hesitates, and it feels like admitting a secret, “It’s the only time I’ve considered stopping a dive.”

“You didn’t, though.”

“No,” El says, “I turned off my torch and followed the instructor’s light. But I’ve hated diving at night since then, and I never really got over it, I guess. Even with them nowhere to be seen, god, I’m still haunted.”

“That makes sense.” Giorgios scratches at his hair; there isn’t a lot of it. “Why would you tell me this?”

El shrugs. “You tell me a lot of stories,” they say, “I wanted to tell you something as well.” 

* * *

“Here,” Giorgios says, instead of a greeting, and he slides a paper under El’s nose. 

"What’s this?” El blinks up at him, barely awake. 

Giorgios gestures at the paper—no, photograph—yellowed colors and an angry white crease through the middle. “You seemed like you wanted to know more about her. This, this is her.”

El fumbles for the paper, heart suddenly running suicides. 

There’s other people in the picture, but El can’t spare an eye for them. Aphrodite—because it’s obviously Aphrodite, who else could it be?—sits off to the right, head thrown back in laughter, exposing a long, harsh neck. There’s nothing static about her; she leaps off the faded paper, dynamic with an energy that El can’t place, as alive and well and mythical as El had envisioned her. 

Reality would call it an unhealthy fascination, El imagining things, a love born from loneliness. But the features of Aphrodite—sharp nose and dark eyes and soft cheeks—are so familiar, it’s as if they’ve stared at her face on the pillow opposite for years. 

El shouldn’t be in love. But, dear god, they are. It tugs at them like the tide at their feet; a fishing line of unfortunate fate that spans through time, has its hook in their heart, and bridges the dead and the living. 

* * *

The bubbles race away from El, as if they’re scared of the deep that El sinks into.

El couldn’t be less scared. They don’t even feel cold, because they’re not El anymore, they’re the water, and how could they make themself cold? Instead, it feels like floating, warm, happy. It’s a beautiful muffled dark-blue world, where everything is a little simpler, and quieter, and there’s always a far away roof above their head, waving and fracturing shards of light.

Hands snake around their waist like a salt current against freshwater, and tendrils of dark tickle at their ear.

“You’re finally home,” she says, and El knows in their bones, made from the lightest coral, that it’s her, it’s finally her. They open their mouth and–

Water rushes in like a burst dam, fills their lungs like balloons, stretching tighter and tighter and El can’t breath and it’s cold and dark and no light and surface and up up up–

El sits up, chest heaving. They feel out, palms hitting the cracked leather couch, and they remember where they were, napping in the dive center’s classroom. The fan whirs pitifully in the corner, and it reminds them that they’re surrounded by air. Nitrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide and other gases, but not Aphrodite. 

The dream, terrifying as it is, feels right. Like for a little moment, the cogs slotted together, spun in harmony, and everything was the way it should be. 

* * *

El starts spending longer hours at work, offering to take anyone’s shift. They can’t explain it, except that it feels like they’re searching for a way in, a crack in some invisible door in routine day-to-day dives. Except for tonight.

The fish have hatched again. El was supposed to guide someone on a night dive, nothing complicated, or _too_ uncomfortable, but when it got dark, Giorgios walked up from the beach to let them know. They were there, sparkling in the torchlight. Giorgios, bless his tanned old heart, offered to swap, in exchange for El finishing some of his paperwork and closing down the shop after they were done.

But now El sits, and it’s still. The pen lies silently on the desk, and once again, the fan in the corner whirs menacingly. A car drives by outside. Somewhere, crickets chirp. And, distantly, El hears _it_. 

There’s nothing particularly unusual about the waves rushing in their steady beat; but there’s a melody layered over it, a melody El has heard before though it registers no noise, like a sound too low for them to hear. Nevertheless, it rings, like a siren’s song, pulling at the tendrils of their heart. 

The pull strengthens, and El slides back into their chair, spellbound. Almost robotically, they strip out of their shirt and flip-flops, right there on the office floor, leaving them only their swimwear. It leaves their skin bare to the night air when they walk outside, a cold that barely registers, because the melody has taken on an urgent note. 

El fumbles in the equipment shed for a torch, and then stumbles towards the beach, feet hitting rocks, nearly slipping down the short sandy slope. It’s only once they reach the shore, finger nearly on the torch button, that fear drips like cold water down their spine. Dark stretches for miles, the horizon so pitch there is none, and everywhere in the shallows El knows the baby fish lie, if only they’d turn on the light. 

But the song still sings, and it’s not from the water sliding over their toes. Instead, El feels it echoed on the breakers, long lines of rocks only a hundred meters from the shore, meant to weaken the rougher waves that come in and protect swimmers from stronger tides. 

El takes a deep breath, and wades in. Even as they’re swimming, head anxiously above water, El thinks they can feel the fish crawling over their skin, like little worms, burrowing into any crack of flesh they can find. 

It spurs them on, and a rush of salt on the air caresses their cheek as they beat their way through the dark.

The breakers rise like mountains in front of them, and El’s hands sting as they try to catch a grip on the rock, still holding the extinguished torch. They can’t see the barnacles, but they feel it as one of them slices into their foot and they arise like a ghost—exhausted to some deep part of their soul—from the water. The salt stings the cut, and the pain travels up, up, up, like the bubbles from a regulator, and El hears the siren song, as if their ears have reached a new frequency. 

All of a sudden, El knows the melody, recognizes it from the calls of whales, haunting, travelling leagues of oceans to reach their kind. A call to come home, a call of longing, a call of love.

There are no whales in this area, but there it is, the song as clear as day slips through the night.

El stumbles over the rock, and clicks on the torch, shining it around like a lighthouse, though not as a warning, but a search. Immediately, from the beam of light that streaks through the dark and hits the water, tiny fish swarm and sparkle like silver coins.

For the first time, El is not afraid. How could they be? They are there, seeking the same light El does, the same mysterious call that has El feeling blindly through their dreams and drifting through reality. El feels themself love the one part of the ocean they had failed to love. 

The fish cluster together, twisting together into long streams of light and dark, and from the deep, she rises, glittering even as El’s torch flickers out.

“What took you so long?” Aphrodite smiles, and her teeth gleam like seashells.

El knows, before it’s reached their mouth, that their tears taste just like ocean salt. “I couldn’t find you.”

Aphrodite throws her head back and laughs, water cascading in an endless waterfall down her skin. El has known her for a thousand years, and wants to know her for a thousand more. 

“Weren’t you listening?” she asks.

“I am now.” El reaches out, fingers arching. They let themself fall, diving into Aphrodite’s arms, knowing they will be caught like a fish in the net, helpless to escape. Together they sink, dark waves closing over their head, as thousands of silver hatchlings swirl around them like a hurricane. They are the eye of the storm, and El is swallowed whole by the crystal of Aphrodite’s arms. 

El opens their mouth, and the water feels like their first breath of air in centuries. 

* * *

Not every girl lives. 

But, in the loving embrace of the water, and in words spun like fairytales, some never die. 


End file.
